Prevent group ownership change on file save?It may be related to that bug... but that's a really old bug! Opening as www-data wouldn't help because www-data should not have write permissions to the files for security reasons.

Does Ubuntu deliberately contaminate its binaries to help NSA?I support this question, and I do not believe it is "too opinion based". Ubuntu is open source, no? An objective answer can be obtained by a full source code audit. It would not be fast or easy, but it would not be an opinion either. It is possible to answer affirmatively one way or another.